Eli Ben-Sasson

Eli Ben-Sasson was born in 1970 in Kiryat Moshe, a neighborhood in western Jerusalem ^[1]. He grew up in an academic household in a city dense with scholars, and his path led naturally toward the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the institution on whose campuses much of Israeli theoretical computer science took shape.

At the Hebrew University he pursued mathematics and computer science through the doctoral level, completing his Ph.D. in 2001 ^[1]. His graduate work fell within computational complexity theory, the branch of computer science that asks what problems can be solved efficiently and what evidence can convince a skeptical verifier that a computation was done correctly. He was trained under Avi Wigderson, one of the field's central figures and a future Abel Prize laureate, an apprenticeship that placed Ben-Sasson at the heart of the community studying proof complexity and randomness in computation ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Eli Ben-Sasson in those early years would have found a proof-complexity theorist. His doctoral research examined resolution and other propositional proof systems, work that produced the widely cited result on the length of resolution proofs written with Wigderson, published as "Short Proofs Are Narrow: Resolution Made Simple" in the Journal of the ACM ^[2].

After finishing his doctorate, Ben-Sasson crossed the Atlantic for postdoctoral research at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ^[3]. In Cambridge he worked alongside Madhu Sudan and other researchers on probabilistically checkable proofs, known as PCPs, a family of results showing that a verifier can check a long proof with high confidence while reading only a handful of its bits.

This line of research proved decisive for his later career. Papers he co-authored in the early 2000s shortened and simplified PCP constructions, including influential work on PCPs with quasilinear length that made the machinery far less wasteful than earlier constructions ^[3]. What had been a celebrated but seemingly impractical theorem of the 1990s began to look like a candidate for real engineering.

In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he rose to full professor in the computer science department ^[4]. Over more than a decade there he taught, supervised graduate students, and continued publishing on error-correcting codes, interactive proofs, and algebraic techniques for verifying computation. Any account of Eli Ben-Sasson achievements has to note that his academic output during this period built the exact toolkit his later company would depend on.

Around 2013 Ben-Sasson turned his attention to a concrete problem: digital currencies such as Bitcoin exposed every transaction publicly, and every participant had to re-check everyone else's work. Succinct proofs offered an answer to both privacy and scale. He became a lead author of the Zerocash protocol, presented at the 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, which showed how zero knowledge proofs could hide transaction amounts and participants while still letting the network verify correctness ^[5].

Zerocash was commercialized as Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency launched in 2016, and Ben-Sasson served as one of its founding scientists ^[6]. The project demonstrated that succinct non-interactive arguments, until then largely confined to conference proceedings, could secure real money held by real users.

Zcash relied on SNARKs, proofs that required a sensitive initial setup ceremony and rested on cryptographic assumptions vulnerable to future quantum computers. Ben-Sasson and his collaborators wanted proofs without those weaknesses. That ambition produced the next chapter of the Eli Ben-Sasson biography.

In 2018 Ben-Sasson, together with Iddo Bentov, Yinon Horesh, and Michael Riabzev, published "Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity," the paper introducing STARKs (Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge) ^[7]. STARKs let a prover convince a verifier that a large computation was executed correctly, with verification time that grows far more slowly than the computation itself. Unlike earlier SNARKs, they need no trusted setup and rely only on hash functions, which are believed to resist quantum attack.

The same year he co-founded StarkWare Industries in Netanya with Uri Kolodny, Michael Riabzev, and Alessandro Chiesa, leaving his Technion post to build the technology commercially ^[8]. Ben-Sasson initially served as president and chief scientist and later became chief executive. StarkWare built StarkEx, a proof engine adopted by exchanges and trading platforms, and Starknet, a general-purpose network that batches transactions off the main Ethereum chain and posts a single STARK proof of their validity.

Investors took notice quickly. StarkWare raised successive funding rounds from prominent venture firms, and a 2022 round reported by the financial press valued the company at eight billion dollars, placing it among Israel's most valuable startups at the time ^[9]. For a man who had spent twenty years on lemmas about polynomial codes, the market's verdict was a striking endorsement of patient theory.

Ben-Sasson's technical signature is the fusion of algebraic coding theory with proof systems. The FRI protocol (Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proof of Proximity), which he co-developed, sits at the core of STARK verification and has been reimplemented across the blockchain industry, including by teams building for Ethereum ^[7].

He has also been a persistent public educator. Through StarkWare's publications, conference talks, and the annual StarkWare Sessions events, he explains verifiable computing to audiences well beyond academia, often framing blockchains as systems of "integrity without secrets" in which mathematics replaces institutional trust ^[8]. Ethereum's own research community has repeatedly cited STARK-based approaches in its scaling roadmap, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has written extensively about STARK techniques, a sign of how far the ideas traveled ^[10].

Among verifiable Eli Ben-Sasson facts is the breadth of his citation record: his papers on PCPs, Zerocash, and STARKs each rank among the most cited in their subfields, bridging pure complexity theory and deployed financial infrastructure ^[3][5][7].

Ben-Sasson lives in Israel and has largely kept his family life out of public view, in keeping with the norms of both academia and the security-conscious cryptography community. He comes from a family with deep scholarly roots in Jerusalem, and colleagues describe him as an enthusiastic lecturer who prefers whiteboard arguments to slide decks ^[4].

His legacy, still unfolding since he remains active as StarkWare's chief executive, already has a clear shape. He belongs to the small group of researchers who carried zero knowledge and probabilistically checkable proofs from the pages of theory conferences into systems that settle billions of dollars in transactions ^[8][9]. The transparent, post-quantum design of STARKs has become a standard reference point whenever engineers debate how to scale public blockchains without sacrificing verifiability ^[10].

Beyond any single protocol, Ben-Sasson's career offers a model of how decades of unglamorous foundational work can suddenly matter. The PCP theorem was proved years before anyone imagined a blockchain, yet it now underwrites one. That arc, from a Jerusalem doctorate in 2001 to a company valued in the billions, is why his name recurs in histories of applied cryptography ^[1][9].